1.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The official chart of the IPA as of 2005. Click to enlarge. The proper symbols for upstep and downstep are not available in this font, and have been substituted.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
X-ray photos show the sounds [i, u, a, ɑ]
2.
Specials (Unicode block)
–
Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
Specials (Unicode block)
–
Replacement character
3.
Unicode
–
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
Unicode
–
Logo of the
Unicode Consortium
4.
Chubut Province
–
Chubut is a province in southern Argentina, situated between the 42nd parallel south, the 46th parallel south, the Andes range to the west, and the Atlantic ocean to the east. The provinces name derives from the Tehuelche word chupat, meaning transparent, the largest city is Comodoro Rivadavia in the south of the province, it has 180,000 inhabitants. Other important cities are Puerto Madryn, Trelew, Esquel and Sarmiento, Gaiman is a cultural and demographic centre of the region known as Y Wladfa in which Welsh-Argentines are concentrated. Of the 25,000 Welsh speakers in Argentina,5,000 live in the Chubut region, particularly in the early Welsh settlements of Gaiman, Trelew, before the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, nomadic indigenous Tehuelche peoples had inhabited the Patagonia region for thousands of years. They lived as hunter-gatherers and covered territory in seasonal cycles as they followed game, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Spanish missionaries came to the area, and founded the San José Fort on Península Valdés. The indigenous people destroyed it. In 1865, Welsh people came to Chubut in the Mimosa ship, the region was disputed between Chile and Argentina until 1881. Chile renounced its claim in order to prevent Argentina from entering into the War of the Pacific, in which it was fighting against Peru. As part of the Conquista del Desierto, Argentina organized the National Territory of Chubut in 1884, after the last indigenous cacique, Inyacal, surrendered to government forces. At the beginning of the 20th century, after the Boer War, some Boer people settled in the town of Sarmiento, in 1944, the southern part of Chubut and northern part of Santa Cruz were designated the Comodoro Rivadavia military zone. The zone was dissolved in 1955, and Chubut was declared a province, studies in the 1950s revealed mineral wealth in the province, which the government has tried to develop. Population shifts of the late 20th century, especially from Buenos Aires, raised the population steadily from 190,000, the government has encouraged people to resettle here. Most of the inhabitants are in the main cities and they have also settled along the Chubut River. Most areas have a density of less than 1 inhabitant per square kilometer. Chubuts economy, for a time one of the most prosperous in Argentina, is one of the countrys least diversified. Nearly one-quarter of its 2006 output, estimated at US$4.652 billion, is generated by mining and this sectors contribution helped give Chubut the nations fourth-highest per capita output in 2011, US$25,250. Petroleum refining is the economic activity of the province, it generates 13% of Argentine oil production. Chubut produces 21% of the fish catch
Chubut Province
–
Coat of arms
Chubut Province
–
Argentine Geological Society founder Dr. Victorio Angelelli (2nd from right), ca. 1950, whose study of Chubut's mineral wealth identified resources for economic development.
Chubut Province
–
Rada Tilly, on the
Atlantic Ocean.
Chubut Province
–
Southern right whale in
Península Valdés, its preferred sanctuary.
5.
Languages of the United Kingdom
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English, in various dialects, is the most widely spoken language of the United Kingdom, however there are a number of regional languages also spoken. There are 11 indigenous languages spoken across the British Isles,5 Celtic,3 Germanic, there are also many immigrant languages spoken in the British Isles, mainly within inner city areas, these languages are mainly from South Asia and Eastern Europe. The de facto language of the United Kingdom is English. An estimated 700,000 people speak Welsh in the UK, a language in Wales. Approximately 1.5 million people in the UK speak Scots—although there is debate as to whether this is a distinct language, there is some discussion of the languages of the United Kingdoms three Crown dependencies, though they are not part of the United Kingdom. The table below outlines living indigenous languages of the United Kingdom, the languages of the Crown Dependencies are not included here. A significant number of English words are constructed based on roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church, the language was further influenced by the Old Norse language with Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the events marking the separation of Middle. Welsh emerged in the 6th century from Brittonic, the ancestor of Welsh, Breton, Cornish. Welsh is thus a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages, there are also Welsh speakers in Y Wladfa, a Welsh settlement in Argentina, which began in 1865 and is situated mainly along the coast of Chubut Province in the south of Patagonia. Chubut estimates the number of Patagonian Welsh speakers to be about 1,500, both the English and Welsh languages have equal status in Wales according to law. On 7 December 2010, the National Assembly for Wales unanimously approved a set of measures to develop the use of the Welsh language within Wales. On 9 February 2011, this measure received Royal Assent and was passed, the Welsh Language Board indicated in 2004 that 553,000 people were able to speak Welsh. Based on a definition, there has been a 0.9 percentage point increase when compared with the 2001 census. Welsh is therefore a growing language within Wales, of those 553,000 Welsh speakers, 57% were considered by others to be fluent, and 477,000 people consider themselves fluent or fair speakers. 62% of speakers claimed to speak the language daily, including 88% of fluent speakers, conversely, some first-language speakers may choose not to report themselves as such. These phenomena, also seen with other minority languages outside the UK, make it harder to establish an accurate, an estimated 110,000 to 150,000 people speak Welsh in England. Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language native to Scotland, a member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, Scottish Gaelic, like Modern Irish and Manx, developed out of Middle Irish, and thus descends ultimately from Primitive Irish
Languages of the United Kingdom
–
Street sign in
Ballywalter,
Northern Ireland, in
English and
Ulster Scots.
Languages of the United Kingdom
–
Languages of the United Kingdom
Languages of the United Kingdom
–
Bilingual road markings near
Cardiff Airport,
Vale of Glamorgan
Languages of the United Kingdom
–
Bilingual sign (Scottish Gaelic and English) at
Partick railway station,
Glasgow
6.
Wales
–
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, and it had a population in 2011 of 3,063,456 and has a total area of 20,779 km2. Wales has over 1,680 miles of coastline and is mountainous, with its higher peaks in the north and central areas, including Snowdon. The country lies within the temperate zone and has a changeable. Welsh national identity emerged among the Celtic Britons after the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, Llywelyn ap Gruffudds death in 1282 marked the completion of Edward I of Englands conquest of Wales, though Owain Glyndŵr briefly restored independence to Wales in the early 15th century. The whole of Wales was annexed by England and incorporated within the English legal system under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542, distinctive Welsh politics developed in the 19th century. Welsh Liberalism, exemplified in the early 20th century by Lloyd George, was displaced by the growth of socialism, Welsh national feeling grew over the century, Plaid Cymru was formed in 1925 and the Welsh Language Society in 1962. Established under the Government of Wales Act 1998, the National Assembly for Wales holds responsibility for a range of devolved policy matters, two-thirds of the population live in south Wales, mainly in and around Cardiff, Swansea and Newport, and in the nearby valleys. Now that the countrys traditional extractive and heavy industries have gone or are in decline, Wales economy depends on the sector, light and service industries. Wales 2010 gross value added was £45.5 billion, over 560,000 Welsh language speakers live in Wales, and the language is spoken by a majority of the population in parts of the north and west. From the late 19th century onwards, Wales acquired its popular image as the land of song, Rugby union is seen as a symbol of Welsh identity and an expression of national consciousness. The Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons came to use the term Wælisc when referring to the Celtic Britons in particular, the modern names for some Continental European lands and peoples have a similar etymology. The modern Welsh name for themselves is Cymry, and Cymru is the Welsh name for Wales and these words are descended from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning fellow-countrymen. The use of the word Cymry as a self-designation derives from the location in the post-Roman Era of the Welsh people in modern Wales as well as in northern England and southern Scotland. It emphasised that the Welsh in modern Wales and in the Hen Ogledd were one people, in particular, the term was not applied to the Cornish or the Breton peoples, who are of similar heritage, culture, and language to the Welsh. The word came into use as a self-description probably before the 7th century and it is attested in a praise poem to Cadwallon ap Cadfan c. 633. Thereafter Cymry prevailed as a reference to the Welsh, until c.1560 the word was spelt Kymry or Cymry, regardless of whether it referred to the people or their homeland. The Latinised forms of names, Cambrian, Cambric and Cambria, survive as lesser-used alternative names for Wales, Welsh
Wales
–
Bryn Celli Ddu, a late Neolithic chambered tomb on Anglesey
Wales
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Flag
Wales
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This article is about the country. For other uses, see
Wales (disambiguation).
Wales
–
Coin of
Magnus Maximus
7.
England
–
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west, the Irish Sea lies northwest of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east, the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain in its centre and south, and includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly, and the Isle of Wight. England became a state in the 10th century, and since the Age of Discovery. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the worlds first industrialised nation, Englands terrain mostly comprises low hills and plains, especially in central and southern England. However, there are uplands in the north and in the southwest, the capital is London, which is the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland through another Act of Union to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain, the name England is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means land of the Angles. The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages, the Angles came from the Angeln peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea. The earliest recorded use of the term, as Engla londe, is in the ninth century translation into Old English of Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars, it has been suggested that it derives from the shape of the Angeln peninsula, an angular shape. An alternative name for England is Albion, the name Albion originally referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus, specifically the 4th century BC De Mundo, in it are two very large islands called Britannia, these are Albion and Ierne. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, the word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins. Albion is now applied to England in a poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England, Lloegr, the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximately 780,000 years ago. The oldest proto-human bones discovered in England date from 500,000 years ago, Modern humans are known to have inhabited the area during the Upper Paleolithic period, though permanent settlements were only established within the last 6,000 years
England
–
Stonehenge, a
Neolithic monument
England
–
Flag
England
–
Boudica led an uprising against the
Roman Empire
England
–
Replica of a 7th-century ceremonial
helmet from the
Kingdom of East Anglia, found at
Sutton Hoo
8.
Second language
–
A persons second language or L2, is a language that is not the native language of the speaker, but that is used in the locale of that person. In contrast, a language is a language that is learned in an area where that language is not generally spoken. Some languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or linguas franca, more informally, a second language can be said to be any language learned in addition to ones native language, especially in the context of second language acquisition. A persons first language is not necessarily their dominant language, the one they use most or are most comfortable with and this can happen when young children move, with or without their family, to a new language environment. The distinction between acquiring and learning was made by Stephen Krashen as part of his Monitor Theory, according to Krashen, the acquisition of a language is a natural process, whereas learning a language is a conscious one. In the former, the student needs to partake in natural communicative situations, in the latter, error correction is present, as is the study of grammatical rules isolated from natural language. Not all educators in second language agree to this distinction, however, research in SLA. focuses on the developing knowledge and use of a language by children and adults who already know at least one other language. SLA has been influenced by linguistic and psychological theories. One of the dominant linguistic theories hypothesizes that a device or module of sorts in the brain contains innate knowledge, many psychological theories, on the other hand, hypothesize that cognitive mechanisms, responsible for much of human learning, process language. These theories have all influenced second-language teaching and pedagogy, there are many different methods of second-language teaching, many of which stem directly from a particular theory. Some of these approaches are more popular than others, and are viewed to be more effective, most language teachers do not use one singular style, but will use a mix in their teaching. This provides a balanced approach to teaching and helps students of a variety of learning styles succeed. The defining difference between a first language and a language is the age the person learned the language. For example, linguist Eric Lenneberg used second language to mean a language consciously acquired or used by its speaker after puberty, in most cases, people never achieve the same level of fluency and comprehension in their second languages as in their first language. These views are closely associated with the critical period hypothesis, in acquiring an L2, Hyltenstam found that around the age of six or seven seemed to be a cut-off point for bilinguals to achieve native-like proficiency. After that age, L2 learners could get near-native-like-ness but their language would, the inability of some subjects to achieve native-like proficiency must be seen in relation to the age of onset. “The age of 6 or 8 does seem to be an important period in distinguishing between near-native and native-like ultimate attainment, more specifically, it may be suggested that AO interacts with frequency and intensity of language use”. Furthermore, they discuss a number of cases where a native-like L2 was acquired during adulthood, as we are learning more and more about the brain, there is a hypothesis that when a child is going through puberty, that is the time that accents start
Second language
–
Blackboard used in
class at
Harvard shows
students ' efforts at placing the
diaeresis and
acute accent diacritics used in
Spanish orthography.
Second language
–
A German student learning French.
English (1.5 billion learners),
French (82 million learners) and
Chinese (30 million learners) are the three most commonly studied foreign languages.
Second language
–
High school Spanish taught as a second
language to a class of native
English speakers at an
American private school in
Massachusetts.
9.
First language
–
A first language is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. If there are multiple L1, the designation first language is used for the L1 spoken the best or the one that is the basis for sociolinguistic identity. In some countries, the native language or mother tongue refers to the language of ones ethnic group rather than ones first language. Children brought up speaking more than one language can have more than one native language, by contrast, a second language is any language that one speaks other than ones first language. Native speakers are considered to be an authority on their language because of their natural acquisition process regarding the language. That is achieved by interaction with the language and speakers of the language. Native speakers will not necessarily be knowledgeable about every rule of the language. Sometimes, the mother tongue or mother language is used for the language that a person learned as a child at home. Children growing up in homes can, according to this definition, have more than one mother tongue or native language. It is quite possible that the first language learned is no longer a dominant language. According to Ivan Illich, the mother tongue was first used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of Latin. That is, the mother the Church introduced this term. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, on 17 November 1999, UNESCO designated 21 February as International Mother Language Day. The first language of a child is part of the personal, social and cultural identity, another impact of the first language is that it brings about the reflection and learning of successful social patterns of acting and speaking. It is basically responsible for differentiating the linguistic competence of acting and that has implications on the education of non-native speakers. The topic of native speaker also gives way to discussion about what exactly bilingualism is, one definition is that a person is bilingual by being equally proficient in both languages. A person who grows up speaking English and begins learning Spanish for four years is not necessarily bilingual unless he speaks the two languages with equal fluency, one can have two or more native languages, thus being a native bilingual or indeed multilingual. The order in which languages are learned is not necessarily the order of proficiency
First language
–
The monument for the mother tongue in
Nakhchivan,
Azerbaijan
First language
–
International Mother Language Day Monument in Sydney, Australia, unveiling ceremony, 19 February 2006
10.
Language family
–
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others
Language family
–
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see
Distribution of languages in the world.
11.
Indo-European languages
–
The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The Indo-European family includes most of the languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia, the ancient Tarim Basin and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations, all Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other language families. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, in 1583, English Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens in Goa wrote a letter to his brother in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens nor Sassettis observations led to further scholarly inquiry and he included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorns suggestions did not become known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission, gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving from the extremes of the language family. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the familys southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches, a number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopps Comparative Grammar appeared between 1833 and 1852 and marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline, the classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleichers 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmanns Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmanns neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussures development of the theory may be considered the beginning of modern Indo-European studies. This led to the laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics. Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC, Armenian, writing known from the beginning of the 5th century AD
Indo-European languages
–
Franz Bopp, pioneer in the field of comparative linguistic studies.
Indo-European languages
12.
Celtic languages
–
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. Modern Celtic languages are spoken on the north-western edge of Europe, notably in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall. There are also a number of Welsh speakers in the Patagonia area of Argentina. Some people speak Celtic languages in the other Celtic diaspora areas of the United States, Canada, Australia, in all these areas, the Celtic languages are now only spoken by minorities though there are continuing efforts at revitalisation. Welsh is the only Celtic language not classified as endangered by UNESCO, the spread to Cape Breton and Patagonia occurred in modern times. SIL Ethnologue lists six living Celtic languages, of four have retained a substantial number of native speakers. These are the Goidelic languages and the Brittonic languages, the other two, Cornish and Manx, died in modern times with their presumed last native speakers in 1777 and 1974 respectively. For both these languages, however, revitalisation movements have led to the adoption of these languages by adults and children, taken together, there were roughly one million native speakers of Celtic languages as of the 2000s. In 2010, there were more than 1.4 million speakers of Celtic languages, shelta, based largely on Irish with influence from an undocumented source. Some forms of Welsh-Romani or Kååle also combined Romany itself with Welsh language, beurla-reagaird, Highland travellers language Celtic divided into various branches, Lepontic, the oldest attested Celtic language. Anciently spoken in Switzerland and in Northern-Central Italy, from the Alps to Umbria, coins with Lepontic inscriptions have been found in Noricum and Gallia Narbonensis. Celtiberian, anciently spoken in the Iberian peninsula, in parts of modern Galicia, Asturias, La Rioja, Aragón, Cantabria, Old Castile, the relationship of Celtiberian with Gallaecian, in the northwest of the peninsula, is uncertain. Gallaecian, anciently spoken in the former Gallaecia, northwest of the peninsula, Gaulish languages, including Galatian and possibly Noric. These languages were spoken in a wide arc from Belgium to Turkey. Brittonic, including the living languages Breton, Cornish, and Welsh, before the arrival of Scotti on the Isle of Man in the 9th century, there may have been a Brittonic language in the Isle of Man. Goidelic, including the living languages Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic, scholarly handling of the Celtic languages has been rather argumentative owing to scarceness of primary source data. Other scholars distinguish between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, putting most of the Gaulish and Brittonic languages in the former group, the P-Celtic languages are sometimes seen as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages. In the P/Q classification schema, the first language to split off from Proto-Celtic was Gaelic and it has characteristics that some scholars see as archaic, but others see as also being in the Brittonic languages
Celtic languages
–
Classification of Indo-European languages. (click to enlarge)
13.
Brittonic languages
–
The Brittonic, Brythonic or British Celtic languages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic language family, the other is Goidelic. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython, the name Brittonic derives ultimately from the name Prettanike, recorded by Greek authors for the British Isles. Some authors reserve the term Brittonic for the modified later Brittonic languages after about AD600, the Brittonic languages derive from the Common Brittonic language, spoken throughout Great Britain south of the Firth of Forth during the Iron Age and Roman period. In addition, North of the Forth, the Pictish language is considered to be related, it is possible it was a Brittonic language, in the 5th and 6th centuries emigrating Britons also took Brittonic speech to the continent, most significantly in Brittany and Britonia. During the next few centuries the language began to split into several dialects, eventually evolving into Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Welsh and Breton continue to be spoken as native languages, while a revival in Cornish has led to an increase in speakers of that language. Cumbric is extinct, having been replaced by Goidelic and English speech, the Isle of Man and Orkney may also have originally spoken a Brittonic language, later replaced with a Goidelic one. Due to emigration, there are communities of Brittonic language speakers in England, France. Both were created in the 19th century to avoid the ambiguity of earlier terms such as British, Brythonic was coined in 1879 by the Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython. Brittonic, derived from Briton and also earlier spelled Britonic and Britonnic and it became more prominent through the 20th century, and was used in Kenneth H. Jacksons highly influential 1953 work on the topic, Language and History in Early Britain. Jackson noted that by that time Brythonic had become a term. Today, Brittonic often replaces Brythonic in the literature, rudolf Thurneysen used Britannic in his influential A Grammar of Old Irish, though this never became popular among subsequent scholars. Comparable historical terms include the Medieval Latin lingua Britannica and sermo Britannicus, some writers use British for the language and its descendants, though due to the risk of confusion, others avoid it or use it only in a restricted sense. Jackson, and later John T. Koch, use British only for the phase of the Common Brittonic language. However, subsequent writers have tended to follow Jacksons scheme, rendering this use obsolete, knowledge of the Brittonic languages comes from a variety of sources. For the early information is obtained from coins, inscriptions and comments by classical writers as well as place names. For later languages there is information from medieval writers and modern native speakers, the names recorded in the Roman period are given in Rivet and Smith. The Brittonic branch is referred to as P-Celtic because linguistic reconstruction of the Brittonic reflex of the Proto-Indo-European phoneme *kʷ is p as opposed to Goidelic c. Other major characteristics include, The retention of the Proto-Celtic sequences am and an, Proto-Celtic *wassos servant, young man became Welsh, Cornish and Breton gwas
Brittonic languages
–
Mainly Brittonic areas.
14.
Writing system
–
A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
Writing system
–
Writing systems
Writing system
–
Predominant national and selected regional or minority scripts
Writing system
–
Chinese characters (漢字) are morpho-syllabic. Each one represents a syllable with a distinct meaning, but some characters may have multiple meanings or pronunciations
Writing system
–
A Specimen of typefaces and styles, by
William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728
Cyclopaedia
15.
Latin script
–
Latin script is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as in many languages in other parts of the world. Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world, Latin script is also the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The 26 most widespread letters are the contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The script is either called Roman script or Latin script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome, in the context of transliteration, the term romanization or romanisation is often found. Unicode uses the term Latin as does the International Organization for Standardization, the numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements, Roman numerals. The numbers 1,2,3. are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, the Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, the speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, the Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples, most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script. It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines, Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, however, the sound values are completely different. In the late 19th century, the Romanians returned to the Latin alphabet, under French rule and Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürks reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets, although the only official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers. In 2015, the Kazakh government announced that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the system for the Kazakh language by 2025. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were written with the Roman characters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, a digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨rh⟩, ⟨sh⟩ in English, a trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c’h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩
Latin script
–
Latin Roman
16.
Welsh orthography
–
Welsh orthography uses 29 letters of the Latin script to write native Welsh words as well as established loanwords. The acute accent, the accent, the circumflex and the diaeresis mark are also used on vowels. Older borrowings of English words containing /dʒ/ resulted in the sound being pronounced and spelt in various other ways, nevertheless, in the Welsh colony in Patagonia, v is used generally to represent the sound /v/. The earliest samples of written Welsh date from the 6th century and are in the Latin alphabet. The orthography differs from that of modern Welsh, particularly in the use of p, t and c to represent the voiced plosives /b, d, ɡ/ in the middle, similarly, the voiced fricatives /v, ð/ were written with b and d. In earlier manuscripts, moreover, fricatives were not distinguished from plosives. The grapheme k was used more commonly than in the modern alphabet. In 1928 a committee chaired by Sir John Morris-Jones standardised the orthography of modern Welsh, in 1987, a committee chaired by Professor Stephen J. Williams made further small changes. The conventions established by these committees are not adhered to by all modern writers, N and S indicate variants specific to the northern and southern dialects of Welsh. Throughout Wales an alternative system is also in use in which all consonant letters are named using the corresponding consonant sound plus a schwa, in this system the vowels are named as below. Notes Welsh makes use of a number of diacritics, the circumflex is used to mark long vowels, so â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, ŷ are always long. The acute accent is used to mark a stressed final syllable in a polysyllabic word. Thus the words gwacáu and dicléin have final stress, however, not all polysyllabic words with final stress are marked with the acute accent. The acute may also be used to indicate that a letter w represents a vowel where a glide might otherwise be expected, e. g. gẃraidd /ˈɡʊ. raið/ manly, as opposed to gwraidd /ˈɡʷraið/ root. Similarly, the diaeresis is used to indicate that two adjoining vowels are to be pronounced separately, e. g. copïo pronounced /kɔˈpiːɔ/, not */ˈkɔpjɔ/. The grave and acute accents in particular are often omitted in casual writing. The circumflex, however, is usually included, accented vowels are not considered distinct letters for the purpose of collation. As mentioned above, vowels marked with the circumflex are always long, if a vowel is not marked with a diacritic, its length must be determined by its environment, the rules vary a bit according to dialect
Welsh orthography
–
A 19th century Welsh alphabet printed in
Welsh
17.
United Kingdom
–
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom or Britain, is a sovereign country in western Europe. Lying off the north-western coast of the European mainland, the United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland, with an area of 242,500 square kilometres, the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world and the 11th-largest in Europe. It is also the 21st-most populous country, with an estimated 65.1 million inhabitants, together, this makes it the fourth-most densely populated country in the European Union. The United Kingdom is a monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. The monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who has reigned since 6 February 1952, other major urban areas in the United Kingdom include the regions of Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. The United Kingdom consists of four countries—England, Scotland, Wales, the last three have devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in their capitals, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, respectively. The relationships among the countries of the UK have changed over time, Wales was annexed by the Kingdom of England under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. A treaty between England and Scotland resulted in 1707 in a unified Kingdom of Great Britain, which merged in 1801 with the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1922, leaving the present formulation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, there are fourteen British Overseas Territories. These are the remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in the 1920s, British influence can be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former colonies. The United Kingdom is a country and has the worlds fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP. The UK is considered to have an economy and is categorised as very high in the Human Development Index. It was the worlds first industrialised country and the worlds foremost power during the 19th, the UK remains a great power with considerable economic, cultural, military, scientific and political influence internationally. It is a nuclear weapons state and its military expenditure ranks fourth or fifth in the world. The UK has been a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council since its first session in 1946 and it has been a leading member state of the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since 1973. However, on 23 June 2016, a referendum on the UKs membership of the EU resulted in a decision to leave. The Acts of Union 1800 united the Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved self-government
United Kingdom
–
Stonehenge, in
Wiltshire, was erected around 2500 BC.
United Kingdom
–
Flag
United Kingdom
–
The
Bayeux Tapestry depicts the
Battle of Hastings, 1066, and the events leading to it.
United Kingdom
–
The
Treaty of Union led to a single united kingdom encompassing all Great Britain.
18.
Argentina
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Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a federal republic in the southern half of South America. With a mainland area of 2,780,400 km2, Argentina is the eighth-largest country in the world, the second largest in Latin America, and the largest Spanish-speaking one. The country is subdivided into provinces and one autonomous city, Buenos Aires. The provinces and the capital have their own constitutions, but exist under a federal system, Argentina claims sovereignty over part of Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The earliest recorded presence in the area of modern-day Argentina dates back to the Paleolithic period. The country has its roots in Spanish colonization of the region during the 16th century, Argentina rose as the successor state of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, a Spanish overseas viceroyalty founded in 1776. The country thereafter enjoyed relative peace and stability, with waves of European immigration radically reshaping its cultural. The almost-unparalleled increase in prosperity led to Argentina becoming the seventh wealthiest developed nation in the world by the early 20th century, Argentina retains its historic status as a middle power in international affairs, and is a prominent regional power in the Southern Cone and Latin America. Argentina has the second largest economy in South America, the third-largest in Latin America and is a member of the G-15 and it is the country with the second highest Human Development Index in Latin America with a rating of very high. Because of its stability, market size and growing high-tech sector, the description of the country by the word Argentina has to be found on a Venice map in 1536. In English the name Argentina probably comes from the Spanish language, however the naming itself is not Spanish, Argentina means in Italian of silver, silver coloured, probably borrowed from the Old French adjective argentine of silver > silver coloured already mentioned in the 12th century. The French word argentine is the form of argentin and derives of argent silver with the suffix -in. The Italian naming Argentina for the country implies Argentina Terra land of silver or Argentina costa coast of silver, in Italian, the adjective or the proper noun is often used in an autonomous way as a substantive and replaces it and it is said lArgentina. The name Argentina was probably first given by the Venitian and Genoese navigators, in Spanish and Portuguese, the words for silver are respectively plata and prata and of silver is said plateado and prateado. Argentina was first associated with the silver mountains legend, widespread among the first European explorers of the La Plata Basin. The first written use of the name in Spanish can be traced to La Argentina, a 1602 poem by Martín del Barco Centenera describing the region, the 1826 constitution included the first use of the name Argentine Republic in legal documents. The name Argentine Confederation was also used and was formalized in the Argentine Constitution of 1853. In 1860 a presidential decree settled the name as Argentine Republic
Argentina
–
The
Cave of the Hands in
Santa Cruz province, with indigenous artwork dating from 13,000–9,000 years ago
Argentina
Argentina
–
The surrender of Beresford to
Santiago de Liniers during the
British invasions of the Río de la Plata
Argentina
–
Portrait of General
José de San Martin,
Libertador of Argentina,
Chile and
Peru
19.
Welsh Government
–
The Welsh Government is the executive of the devolved National Assembly for Wales. The government consists of cabinet secretaries, who attend meetings, and ministers who do not. It is led by the first minister, usually the leader of the largest party in the National Assembly, the government is responsible for tabling policy in devolved areas for consideration by the assembly and implementing policy that has been approved by it. As initially established, the Welsh Government had no independent executive powers in law, following separation, the Welsh ministers exercise functions in their own right. Further transfers of functions from the British government can be made directly to the Welsh ministers by an Order in Council approved by the British parliament. Separation was designed to clarify the roles of the assembly. The result mirrored much more closely the relationship between the British government and British parliament and that between the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament. This separation between the two bodies took effect on the appointment of the First Minister by Queen Elizabeth II following the election on 3 May 2007. Separation was meant to clarify the roles of the assembly. The role of the government is to make decisions, develop and implement policy, exercise executive functions, Assembly measures can now go further than the subordinate legislation which the assembly had the power to make prior to 2007. The assemblys functions, including that of making subordinate legislation, in the main, a third body was also established under the 2006 Act from May 2007, called the National Assembly for Wales Commission. It employs the staff supporting the new National Assembly for Wales, the 2006 Act made new provision for the appointment of Welsh ministers. The First Minister is nominated by the Assembly and then appointed by Her Majesty the Queen, the First Minister then appoints the Welsh Ministers and the Deputy Welsh Ministers, with the approval of Her Majesty. The Act created a new post of Counsel General for Wales, the Counsel General is appointed by the Queen, on the nomination of the First Minister, whose recommendation must be agreed by the National Assembly. The Counsel General may be, but does not have to be, the Act permits a maximum of 12 Welsh Ministers, which includes Deputy Welsh Ministers, but excludes the First Minister and the Counsel General. Accordingly, the size of the Welsh Government is 14. Subject to limitations prescribed by the Government of Wales Act 2006, the government is composed of cabinet secretaries and ministers. The counsel general attends cabinet meetings, the current government is formed by Welsh Labour and also the sole Liberal Democrats Assembly Member, Kirsty Williams
Welsh Government
–
The old Crown Building in Cathays Park – original home of the
Welsh Office.
Welsh Government
–
Logo of the Welsh Government
Welsh Government
–
The New Crown Building is today home to many of the Welsh Government's civil servants.
Welsh Government
–
Tŷ Hywel houses the offices of the cabinet.
20.
Replacement character
–
Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
Replacement character
–
Replacement character
21.
Culture of Wales
–
Wales has a distinctive culture including its own language, customs, holidays and music. Wales is primarily represented by the symbol of the red Welsh Dragon, building on the construction in Wales during the Roman era of occupation, these early kingdoms were also influenced by Ireland, but precise details are unclear prior to the 8th century AD. Several Kingdoms arose at that time, including Gwynedd, Powys, gruffydd was killed by his own men on 5 August 1063 while Harold Godwinson sought to engage him in battle. This was just over three years before the Norman invasion of England, which led to a change of fortune for Wales. By 1070, the Normans had already seen successes in their invasion of Wales with Gwent fallen, the invasion was seemingly complete by 1093. However, the Welsh rebelled against their new overlords the following year, while Gwynedd grew in strength, Powys was broken up after the death of Llywelyn ap Madog in the 1160s and was never reunited. Llywelyn the Great rose in Gwynedd and had reunited the majority of Wales by his death in 1240, after his death, King Henry III of England intervened to prevent Dafydd ap Llywelyn from inheriting his fathers lands outside Gwynedd, leading to war. The claims of his successor, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, conflicted with those of King Edward I of England, maredudds son, Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, anglicised his name to become Owen Tudor, and was the grandfather of Henry Tudor. Henry took the throne of England following the Wars of the Roses when his forces defeated those of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. The House of Tudor continued to reign through several successive monarchs until 1603, official symbols of Wales include the Welsh Dragon, daffodil and leek. Both the dragon and leek date back to the 7th century and he also introduced the Red Dragon standard, although this symbol was most likely introduced to the British Isles by Roman troops. It may also have been a reference to the 6th century Welsh word draig, the standard was appropriated by the Normans during the 11th century, and used for the Royal Standard of Scotland. Richard I of England took a red dragon standard with him on the Third Crusade, the colours of the leek were used for the uniforms of soldiers under Edward I of England. Both symbols were popular with Tudor kings, with Henry VII of England adding the white and it was largely forgotten by the House of Stuart, who favoured a unicorn instead. By the 17th and 18th centuries, it common practice in Great Britain for the gentry to wear leeks on St. Davids Day. In 1807, a a red dragon passant standing on a mound was made the Kings badge for Wales, following an increase in nationalism in 1953, it was proposed to add the motto Y ddraig goch ddyry cychwyn to the flag. This was poorly received, and six years later Queen Elizabeth II intervened to put the current flag in place, the daffodil is a more recent development, becoming popular during the 19th century. It may have linked to the leek, as the Welsh for daffodil translates as St Peters Leek
Culture of Wales
–
The Bard, 1774, by
Thomas Jones (1742–1803)
22.
History of Wales
–
The history of Wales begins with the arrival of human beings in the region thousands of years ago. Neanderthals lived in what is now Wales, or Cymru in Welsh, at least 230,000 years ago, while Homo sapiens arrived by about 31,000 BC. However, continuous habitation by humans dates from the period after the end of the last ice age around 9000 BC, and Wales has many remains from the Mesolithic, Neolithic. During the Iron Age the region, like all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, was dominated by the Celtic Britons, the Romans departed from Britain in the 5th century, opening the door for the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Thereafter Brittonic language and culture began to splinter, and several groups formed. The Welsh people were the largest of groups, and are generally discussed independently of the other surviving Brittonic-speaking peoples after the 11th century. A number of kingdoms formed in present-day Wales in the post-Roman period, internecine struggles and external pressure from the English and later, the Norman conquerors of England, led to the Welsh kingdoms coming gradually under the sway of the English crown. The Welsh launched several revolts against English rule, the last significant one being led by Owain Glyndŵr in the early 15th century. In the 16th century Henry VIII, himself of Welsh extraction as a grandson of Owen Tudor. Under Englands authority, Wales became part of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, yet, the Welsh retained their language and culture in spite of heavy English dominance. The publication of the significant first complete Welsh translation of the Bible by William Morgan in 1588 greatly advanced the position of Welsh as a literary language. Wales played a full and willing role in World War One, the industries of Empire in Wales declined in the 20th century with the end of the British Empire following the Second World War, while nationalist sentiment and interest in self-determination rose. The Labour Party replaced the Liberal Party as the dominant political force in the 1940s, the nationalist party Plaid Cymru gained short lived momentum in the 1960s. In a 1997 referendum Welsh voters approved the devolution of responsibility to a National Assembly for Wales. The Red Lady of Paviland, a human skeleton dyed in red ochre, was discovered in 1823 in one of the Paviland limestone caves of the Gower Peninsula in Swansea, South Wales. Despite the name, the skeleton is that of a man who lived about 33,000 years ago at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period. He is considered to be the oldest known burial in Western Europe. The skeleton was found along with jewellery made from ivory and seashells, following the last ice age, Wales became roughly the shape it is today by about 8000 BC and was inhabited by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers
History of Wales
–
Bryn Celli Ddu, a late Neolithic chambered tomb on Anglesey
History of Wales
–
Roman conquest of Wales
History of Wales
–
Coin of Magnus Maximus
23.
Welsh people
–
The Welsh people or the Welsh are a nation and ethnic group native to, or otherwise associated with, Wales and the Welsh language. Prior to the 20th century, large numbers of Welsh people spoke only Welsh, the term Welsh people applies to people from Wales and people of Welsh ancestry perceiving themselves or being perceived as sharing a cultural heritage and shared ancestral origins. Over 300,000 Welsh people live in London, the same etymological origin is shared by the names of various other Celtic or Latin peoples such as the Walloons and the Vlachs, as well as of the Swiss canton of Valais. The modern Welsh name for themselves is Cymry, and Cymru is the Welsh name for Wales and these words are descended from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning fellow-countrymen. They thus carry a sense of land of fellow-countrymen, our country, the word came into use as a self-description probably before the 7th century. It is attested in a poem to Cadwallon ap Cadfan c. 633. Thereafter Cymry prevailed as a reference to the Welsh, until c.1560 the word was spelt Kymry or Cymry, regardless of whether it referred to the people or their homeland. During their time in Britain, the ancient Romans encountered tribes in present-day Wales that they called the Ordovices, the Demetae, the Silures and the Deceangli. The people of what is now Wales were not distinguished from the rest of the peoples of southern Britain, all were called Britons and spoke the common British language, a Brythonic Celtic tongue. Celtic language and culture seems to have arrived in Britain during the Iron Age, the claim has also been made that Indo-European languages may have been introduced to the British Isles as early as the early Neolithic, with Goidelic and Brythonic languages developing indigenously. The genetic evidence in this case would show that the change to Celtic languages in Britain may have occurred as a cultural rather than through migration as was previously supposed. The assumed genetic imprint of Neolithic incomers is seen as a cline, with stronger Neolithic representation in the east of Europe, when the Roman legions departed Britain around 400, a Romano-British culture remained in the areas the Romans had settled, and the pre-Roman cultures in others. According to Stephen Oppenheimer 96% of lineages in Llangefni in north Wales derive from Iberia, Genetic marker R1b averages from 83–89% amongst the Welsh. The people in what is now Wales continued to speak Brythonic languages with additions from Latin, the surviving poem Y Gododdin is in early Welsh and refers to the Brythonic kingdom of Gododdin with a capital at Din Eidyn and extending from the area of Stirling to the Tyne. John Davies places the change from Brythonic to Welsh between 400 and 700, offas Dyke was erected in the mid-8th century, forming a barrier between Wales and Mercia. The genetic tests suggested that between 50% and 100% of the population of what was to become England was wiped out. In 2001, research for a BBC programme on the Vikings suggested a strong link between the Celts and Basques, dating back tens of thousands of years. The UCL research suggested a migration on a huge scale during the Anglo-Saxon period and it appears England is made up of an ethnic cleansing event from people coming across from the continent after the Romans left, said Dr Mark Thomas, of the Centre for Genetic Anthropology at UCL
Welsh people
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William Morgan
Welsh people
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Sculpture of
Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Welsh person to hold the title
Prince of Wales.
24.
Languages of Wales
–
The two official languages of Wales are Welsh and English. The majority of the population of Wales is able to speak English, English is widely used throughout the country and is the native language of most people in the South and the North East of the country, in the West and North, Welsh is the dominant native language. Nevertheless, there are a number of communities throughout the country to which these generalisations do not apply, for example, despite being located in the overwhelmingly English-speaking city of Swansea, 45% of Mawrs residents speak Welsh as their native language. According to the 2011 census, Welsh is spoken by 19% of the population, Welsh English or Anglo-Welsh is the distinct form of English used in Wales. Aside from lexical borrowings from Welsh like bach, eisteddfod, nain and taid, examples of this include the use by some speakers of the tag question isnt it. Regardless of the form of the statement and the placement of the subject. Fed up, I am or Running on Friday, he is In South Wales the word where may often be expanded to where to, as in the question, the word butty is used to mean friend or mate. It was spoken by the Kale group of the Romani people who arrived in Britain during the 15th century, the first record of Gypsies in Wales comes from the 16th century. Welsh-Romani is one of the many Northern Romani dialects and this dialect of Romany includes some loanwords from Welsh, but little now remains of it. Wales deaf community tends to use British Sign Language, there are a few signs used in Wales which are unique to that country, but these tend to be regionalised rather than national. Other sign languages in use in Wales include Makaton, and Signed English, Latin is also used to a limited degree in certain official mottos, legal terminology, and various ceremonial contexts. Latin abbreviations can also be seen on British coins, the use of Latin has declined greatly in recent years. At one time, Latin and Greek were commonly taught in British schools ), in rare cases, Norman French and Latin have contributed to Welsh toponymy e. g. Beaumaris, Grace Dieu, Strata Florida and Valle Crucis. The Welsh language prefix Caer- is a corruption of the Latin castra, both of the placename elements in Caerleon come ultimately from Latin. Latin has had a significant influence on Welsh in words such as ffenestr and pont, meaning window and bridge respectively. Notable Welsh writers in Latin include Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote Historia Regum Britanniae, and Adam of Usk, author of Chronicon Adæ de Usk, people migrating to Wales in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country. South Asians in the United Kingdom speak dozens of different languages, the largest subgroup of British Asians are those of Punjabi origin, from both India and Pakistan. There is a long established Somali community in Cardiff, and Irish speakers have been coming and going from Wales for many centuries, there are Irish communities in most industrial areas, plus Holyhead, Swansea and Cardiff
Languages of Wales
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English language proficiency in England and Wales
Languages of Wales
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Isca Augusta, the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon
Languages of Wales
–
The former
Cardiff Synagogue, with Welsh, English and Hebrew all within view. There was once a fairly substantial Jewish population in South Wales, most of which has disappeared due to various factors. This synagogue is now an office block, and is on Cathedral Road.
25.
Y Fro Gymraeg
–
However, unlike its equivalent in Ireland, Y Fro Gymraeg does not have official government recognition. In an article dated 12 November 1964, he wrote, Enillwn y Fro Gymraeg, ac fe enillir Cymru, ac oni enillir Y Fro Gymraeg, but today the territory of the language as a majority language has shrunk. A substantial portion of four Welsh counties lies within Y Fro Gymraeg and it is often argued that Welsh medium education is the major contributor to the revival of the language. Education in Y Fro Gymraeg is generally through the medium of Welsh, in Y Fro Gymraeg road signs appear with the Welsh name first, even in non-predominantly Welsh speaking areas. Official publications in general are bilingual, usually with Welsh appearing first
Y Fro Gymraeg
–
The proportion of respondents in the 2011 census who said they could speak Welsh.
26.
History of the Welsh language
–
The history of the Welsh language spans over 1400 years, encompassing the stages of the language known as Primitive Welsh, Old Welsh, Middle Welsh, and Modern Welsh. Welsh evolved from British, the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Britons, alternatively classified as Insular Celtic or P-Celtic, it probably arrived in Britain during the Bronze Age or Iron Age and was probably spoken throughout the island south of the Firth of Forth. During the Early Middle Ages the British language began to fragment due to increased dialect differentiation, evolving into Welsh and it is not clear when Welsh became distinct. Kenneth H. Jackson suggested that the evolution in syllabic structure and sound pattern was complete by around 550, Jackson, however, believed that the two varieties were already distinct by that time. The earliest Welsh poetry – that attributed to the Cynfeirdd or Early Poets – is generally considered to date to the Primitive Welsh period. However, much of this poetry was composed in the Hen Ogledd, raising further questions about the dating of the material. The next main period, somewhat better attested, is Old Welsh, the Book of Aneirin and the Poetry, or Book, of Taliesin belong to this era, though both also include some poems originally written in Primitive Welsh. Middle Welsh is the attached to the Welsh of the 12th to 14th centuries. This is the language of all surviving early manuscripts of the Mabinogion. It is also the language of the existing Welsh law manuscripts, Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible, albeit with some work, to a modern-day Welsh speaker. The famous cleric Gerald of Wales tells a story of King Henry II of England, Modern Welsh can be divided into two periods. The first, Early Modern Welsh ran from the early 15th century to roughly the end of the 16th century, late Modern Welsh began with the publication of William Morgans translation of the Bible in 1588. Of course, many changes have occurred since then, the language enjoyed a further boost in the 19th century, with the publication of some of the first complete and concise Welsh dictionaries. Early work by Welsh lexicographic pioneers such as Daniel Silvan Evans ensured that the language was documented as accurately as possible, Modern dictionaries such as the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, are direct descendants of these dictionaries. In spite of this boost, the use of Welsh was actively discouraged at school under the Welsh Not policy, a stick or plaque was given to any child heard speaking Welsh during school, to be handed on to whoever next spoke the language. The influx of English workers during the Industrial Revolution in Wales from about 1800 led to a dilution of the Welsh-speaking population of Wales. English migrants seldom learnt Welsh and their Welsh colleagues tended to speak English in mixed Welsh–English contexts. The legal status of Welsh was inferior to that of English, an important exception, however, was in the non-conformist churches, which were strongly associated with the Welsh language
History of the Welsh language
–
Remember Tryweryn — famous graffiti
27.
Welsh placenames
–
The placenames of Wales derive in most cases from the Welsh language, but have also been influenced by linguistic contact with the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Anglo-Normans and modern English. The study of placenames in Wales reveals significant features of the countrys history, Welsh culture and political autonomy has been reasserted increasingly since the mid 19th century. Many place names in Britain, particularly of natural features such as rivers and hills, obvious examples of place names of Welsh origin are the numerous Rivers Avon, from the Welsh afon and place names such as Penrith. Place names from the Western Brittonic-speaking Hen Ogledd occur in Cumbria and these include the name of Edinburgh, from Cumbric Din Eidin Eidins Fort. Welsh remains a language, spoken by over 20% of the countrys population. Like all languages, it has changed over time and continues to do so, for instance by accepting loan words from languages such as Latin. The Welsh language itself has many characteristics unfamiliar to most English speakers that can make it difficult to understand its place names, for example, it uses a number of initial consonant changes in different grammatical circumstances. In relation to place names, this means that, for example, other changes can apply to internal vowels. There are also differences between Welsh and English spelling standards, which have affected how place names are spelled in the two languages, early inhabitants of Wales gave names first to noteworthy natural features, such as rivers, hills, mountains, harbours and shores. The Roman towns which were established were generally fortified and were given the name of castra. Many of these continued as towns after the Romans left, including Caernarfon, Carmarthen, Caerleon, elsewhere, many villages and later towns took their names from natural features. For example, Abergele refers to the mouth of the Gele, Harlech means fair rock, Rhuddlan red bank, and Porthcawl harbour with sea-kale. Aberystwyth means mouth of the Ystwyth, a river a mile or so away from the town centre, many others took their name from religious settlements and clasau established from the fifth century onwards. These generally use the prefix llan, roughly equivalent to parish, most of them are dedicated to their founders, who hailed from local dynasties and were venerated as patron saints. Examples include Llandudno, Llanelli, and Llantwit, following the Norman invasion of Wales, some were rededicated to more generic saints, Llanilar, Llanfoist. A few—usually by mistake—include other elements or none at all, Llan, Powys, Llanharry, other religious placenames include merthyr and eglwys. Over the centuries, Welsh place names have been affected by social. The Industrial Revolution saw the development of new towns and villages
Welsh placenames
–
The castle at
Caernarfon (meaning in Welsh "the fortress in
Arfon "), which was formerly
anglicised as "Carnarvon" or "Caernarvon". The name "Arfon" refers to the area "opposite Môn" or
Anglesey.
Welsh placenames
–
St. Mary's, which gave its name to the village of
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll,
Anglesey (Ynys Môn), Wales
28.
Welsh surnames
–
Fixed family names were adopted in Wales from the 15th century onwards. Until this point, the Welsh had a naming system. In 1292,48 percent of Welsh names were patronymics, other names were derived from nicknames, occupational names, and a few non-hereditary personal names. Patronymic names changed from generation to generation, with a baptismal name being linked by ap. For example, Evan son of Thomas would be known as Evan Thomas, Evans son, John, would be John Evan, Johns son Rees would be Rees John, and Davids son, James, would be James David. Patronymics were essentially a history of the family, and names such as Llewelyn ap Dafydd ab Ieuan ap Griffith ap Meredith were not uncommon. The Encyclopedia of Wales surmises that the system arose from Welsh law, in the reign of Henry VIII surnames became hereditary amongst the Welsh gentry, and the custom spread slowly amongst commoners. Areas where English influence was strong abandoned patronymics earlier, as did town families, new surnames retained the ap in a few cases, mainly in reduced form at the start of the surname, as in Upjohn, Powell, and Bowen. Alternatively, the ap was simply dropped entirely, the most common surnames in modern Wales result from adding an s to the end of the name, as in Jones, Roberts and Edwards. Patronymic surnames with the short -s form are recorded in parts of England dating back to the Middle Ages. Indeed, currently it is not uncommon that five or more of the starting fifteen for the Welsh international rugby team would be named Jones, a hyphen was sometimes later introduced, for example Nash-Williams. The stock of Welsh surnames is very small, which is attributable to the reduction in the variety of baptismal names after the Protestant Reformation. A total of 16.3 million people in the countries studied had a name of Welsh origin, data from University College London, Paediatric-Epidemiology Significance Surnames Paper. Alternatively, given surnames are used, as in the case of the singer and political figure Dafydd Iwan, opera singer Bryn Terfel, classical singer Shân Cothi
Welsh surnames
–
Welsh Genealogical History
29.
Welsh English
–
Welsh English refers to the dialects of English spoken in Wales by Welsh people. The dialects are influenced by Welsh grammar and often include words derived from Welsh. In addition to the words and grammar, a variety of accents are found across Wales, including those of north Wales, the Cardiff dialect. In the east and south east, it has influenced by West Country dialects due to immigration, while in North Wales. The vowel of cat /æ/ is pronounced as a more central near-open front unrounded vowel, in Cardiff, bag is pronounced with a long vowel. In Powys, a pronunciation resembling its New Zealand and South African analogue is sometimes heard, the uncertainty over which vowel to use often leads to hypercorrections involving the schwa, e. g. programme is often pronounced /ˈproː. e. A lowered close-mid front rounded vowel Most other long monophthongs are similar to that of Received Pronunciation, but words with the RP /əʊ/ are sometimes pronounced as, examples of this include the use by some speakers of the tag question isnt it. Regardless of the form of the statement and the placement of the subject. Fed up, I am or Running on Friday, he is, in South Wales the word where may often be expanded to where to, as in the question, Where to is your Mam. The word tidy has been described as One of the most over-worked Wenglish words and can have a range of meanings including - fine or splendid, long, decent, a tidy swill is a wash involving at least face and hands. Spellings are almost identical to other dialects of British English, minor differences occur with words descended from Welsh that are not anglicised unlike in many other dialects of English. In Wales, the valley is always cwm, not the Anglicised version coombe, as with other dialects of British English, -ise endings are preferred, realise instead of realize. David Crystal, who grew up in Holyhead, claims that the dominance of English in Wales is little different from its spread elsewhere in the world. While other British English accents have affected the accents of English in Wales, in particular, Scouse and Brummie accents have both had extensive Anglo-Welsh input through migration, although in the former case, the influence of Anglo-Irish is better known. Anglo-Welsh literature and Welsh writing in English are terms used to describe works written in the English language by Welsh writers and it has been recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century. A rival claim for the first Welsh writer to use English creatively is made for the poet, John Clanvowe. In the UK TV series Thomas & Friends, the Narrow Gauge Engines Skarloey, Rheneas, Sir Handel, Peter Sam and Duke speak with Welsh Dialect, the Welsh comedy-drama series Stella is set in a fictional South Wales valley where Welsh English can be heard throughout. – Listen to examples of regional accents and dialects from across the UK on the British Librarys Sounds Familiar website Talk Tidy, John Edwards, Author of books and CDs on the subject Wenglish
Welsh English
–
Dylan Thomas' writing shed.
30.
Traditional Welsh costume
–
The traditional Welsh costume is a costume once worn by rural women in Wales. It was identified as being different from that worn by the women of England by many of the English visitors who toured Wales during the late 18th. It is very likely that what they wore was a survival of a costume worn by working rural women. This included a version of the bedgown, originally worn by the gentry in the 17th and 18th centuries, the unique Welsh hat, which first made its appearance in the 1830s, was used as an icon of Wales from the 1840s. From the 1880s, when the costume had gone out of general use. From then on it was worn by women at such as Royal visits, by choirs, at church and chapel, for photographs. It was first worn by girls as a celebration on Saint Davids Day just before the First World War, the costume is now recognised as the national dress of Wales. Very little evidence for traditional Welsh costume survives before about 1770 when the first tourists came to Wales and recorded in words and they noted that the women in rural parts of Wales wore a distinctive costume which varied from place to place. Women in towns and those who lived near the Welsh-English border or near busy ports were already wearing English fashions, during the 1830s, certain members of the gentry, especially Augusta Hall of Llanover near Abergavenny, recorded and tried to preserve some Welsh traditions, including costume. The prints of costumes of parts of Wales which she may have commissioned did not have a wide distribution, some of them were published in an article in 1951. Although the traditional costume went out of use by the middle of the 19th century it was still worn by some women at market. There were calls for Welsh costume to be revived and used at major national events, in 1834, Augusta Hall wrote a prize-winning essay for the Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire eisteddfod held in Cardiff but this contains very little about costume, and nothing about National costumes. The national costume made from Welsh wool was therefore seen as a declaration of a Welsh identity. During an 1881 visit by the Prince of Wales to Swansea, from the 1880s both old and modern versions of the costume were worn by performers at concerts and eisteddfodau, by stall holders at fund raising events and for Royal visits. The numbers of women who wore Welsh costume in this way was always small, some of those who wore it may have been the younger members of the new middle-class families who could afford the money to buy the costumes and the time to attend such events. Although there was only a little encouragement to wear costumes at these events, there is little evidence to support the suggestion that the Welsh costume was worn just to please visitors, but it possible that this happened. The modern costume worn by girls on St David’s Day, which used to be made by mothers from old costumes, is now commercially available, the costume now generally worn by dance teams is based on the tailored gowns originally found in south west Wales. The most distinctive feature of the Welsh costume, other than the hat, is the gown and it is spelt in various ways in Welsh, most commonly now as betgwn
Traditional Welsh costume
–
A late 19th century photo of women in a rural Welsh costume
Traditional Welsh costume
–
Welsh Fashions Taken on a Market Day in Wales (R Griffiths, 1851)
Traditional Welsh costume
Traditional Welsh costume
–
Vosper's 1908 watercolour Salem one of the most recognised images of the Traditional Welsh costume.
31.
Welsh law
–
Welsh law is the primary and secondary legislation generated by the National Assembly for Wales, according to devolved authority granted in the Government of Wales Act 2006. Each piece of Welsh legislation is known as an Act of the Assembly, the first Assembly legislation to be officially proposed was called the NHS Redress Measure 2008. These powers have been effective since May 2007, both the Government of Wales Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 2006 set out areas of devolved responsibility for the National Assembly for Wales. The 2006 granted the Assembly legislative competence to make laws in clearly defined matters, once the Queen has approved the Order, the new area of legislative competence is added to Schedule 5, Part 1 of the Government of Wales Act 2006. There is a Counsel General for Wales who oversees the approval and creation of these laws, a referendum under these provisions was held in March 2011 and resulted in a vote in favour of granting the assembly the competence to pass the Acts of the Assembly. Therefore, the Assembly now has the competence to pass Acts of the Assembly in all 20 devolved subjects. This is done to preserve the autonomy of the Welsh Assembly and these areas are subjects where the National Assembly for Wales can make legislation in the form of an Act of the Assembly. The Welsh Assembly was able to make only Assembly Measures, but the Assembly was given the option to call for a referendum, with added approval from the UK Parliament, to make Acts of the Assembly. This would not change much of the Assembly Measures system, and if the referendum should win and it was considered that Assembly Measures are a build on to the Acts of the Assembly if the Assembly would these powers in future. The referendum was held on 3 March 2011, the majority of the participants voted Yes to the question Do you want the Assembly now to be able to make laws on all matters in the 20 subject areas it has powers for. The power to make Acts of the Assembly are called Subjects, English law still apply to Wales under the present devolution settlement. Contemporary Welsh law will govern the local aspects of Welsh life whilst English law will govern the more generic aspects, because these laws are derived from UK Acts of Parliament, some people consider this new system of laws to be another branch of English law. Unlike Scotland, for example, which has its own criminal and civil justice system, the One Wales Labour/Plaid Cymru deal also has an area for devolution of a Criminal and Youth Justice System to this new legal system. It is important to note, that English law still applies in Wales, but it also be important to say that some laws in England. Its possible to say there could be some acts that would be illegal in Wales. For example, using a shock collar on a cat or dog in Wales is illegal. There are Acts of the United Kingdom Parliament that are classed as Wales-only laws, each Act contains provisions for the Welsh Assembly to make subordinate legislation on. Sometimes such Acts can also confer power to the National Assembly for Wales, an example of such a Wales-only law is the Transport Act 2006
Welsh law
–
Wales
32.
Commote
–
A commote, was a secular division of land in Medieval Wales. The word derives from the prefix cym- and the noun bod, the English word commote is derived from the Middle Welsh cymwt. The basic unit of land was the tref – a small village or settlement, in theory,100 trefi made up a cantref, and half or a third of a cantref was a cymwd, although in practice the actual numbers varied greatly. The plural of cantref is cantrefi, together with the cantrefi, commotes were the geographical divisions through which defence and justice were organised. In charge of a commote would be a chieftain related to the ruling Prince of the Kingdom. His court would have been situated in a special tref, referred to as a maerdref, here, the bonded villagers who farmed the chieftains estate lived, together with the court officials and servants. Commotes were further divided into maenorau or maenolydd, the Domesday Book has entries for those commotes that in 1086 were under Norman control, but still subject to Welsh law and custom. However, it refers to using the Anglo-Norman word commot instead of hundred. The commotes mentioned in the Domesday book, in general, represented recent Anglo-Norman advances into Welsh territory, although the commotes were assessed for military service and taxation, their obligations were rated in carucate, not in hides as on the English side of the border. The customs of the commotes are described in the Domesday accounts of the earldoms of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire. The principal commotes described in Domesday were Archenfield, Ewias, and the commotes of Gwent in the south, Cynllaith, Edeirnion, and Iâl, and Englefield, Rhos and Rhufoniog. In legal usage, the English word commote replaced cwmwd following the Edwardian conquest of Wales in the 13th century, the Welsh, most of whom knew not a word of English, naturally continued to use cwmwd and still do so today. Owain Glyndŵr called representatives from the commotes for his two parliaments during the rising of 1400–1409. A considerable number of the names of adjacent medieval Welsh commotes contain is and uwch, the terminology is for administrative purposes and not a geographical characterisation. A number of units, such as manors, parishes and townships, also use the administrative distinction of is and uwch. This is unrelated to the use of isaf and uchaf in farm names. The Red Book of Hergest provides a detailed list of commotes in the late 14th, the list has some overlaps and is ambiguous in parts, especially in the Gwynedd section. It should also be borne in mind that the number and organisation of the commotes was different in the earlier Middle Ages, some of the units, the original orthography of the manuscript is given here together with the standard modern Welsh equivalents
Commote
–
Contents
33.
Cantref
–
A cantref was a medieval Welsh land division, particularly important in the administration of Welsh law. Land in medieval Wales was divided into cantrefi, which were divided into smaller cymydau. The word cantref is derived from cant and tref, the cantref is thought to be the original unit, with the commotes being a later division. Cantrefi could vary considerably in size, most were divided into two or three commotes, but the largest, the Cantref Mawr in Ystrad Tywi was divided into seven commotes. To give an idea of the size of a cantref, the island of Anglesey was divided into three cantrefi, Cemais, Aberffraw and Rhosyr, the antiquity of the cantrefi is demonstrated by the fact that they often mark the boundary between dialects. Some were originally kingdoms in their own right, others may have been artificial units created later, cantrefi were of particular importance in the administration of the Welsh law. Each cantref had its own court, which was an assembly of the uchelwyr and this would be presided over by the king if he happened to be present, or if he was not present, by his representative. Apart from the judges there would be a clerk, an usher, the cantref court dealt with crimes, the determination of boundaries, and inheritance. Ergyng Hundred Kocourek, Albert, Wigmore, John H. eds, sources of Ancient and Primitive Law. Welsh Administrative and Territorial Units, Medieval and Modern
Cantref
–
Cantrefi of Medieval Wales
![[]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/Parentesi_Quadre.svg/30px-Parentesi_Quadre.svg.png){kind=small}
listen)) is a member of the Brittonic branch of the Celtic languages. It is spoken natively in Wales, by some in England, and in Y Wladfa (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina).[9] Historically, it has also been known in English as "Cambrian",[10] "Cambric"[11] and "Cymric".[12]
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Definitions from Wiktionary
Media from Commons
Texts from Wikisource
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Travel guide from Wikivoyage
Learning resources from Wikiversity
Data from Wikidata
